[packman] Scantool for SuSE

[Haakon Meland Eriksen]

Hi everyone!

Quentin didn't have time to try this himself, but suggested I try the list to 
see if anyone was interested.

Have you noticed the limited realms of human action that has free (as in 
freedom) software available to it?  Where is the software for carpenters, car 
mechanics, producers of clothes and so on? General purpose text editors and 
calculators abound, so isn't it time to look a bit further?

My wife worked as a teacher for a student that had very limited abilities
in reading, writing and mathmatics. However, he was a nice boy who tried
hard to stay motivated. He was really good at fixing cars, and we thought
"What if we relate his scool acitivities to his main interest?" So my wife
made a lot of progress with him when she had him writing about cars, in
stead of other subjects. We wanted to do the same in maths, but didn't come
round to that.

We had the idea to use Scantool from www.scantool.net, a car diagnostics
tool, to get data from the on board car computer, import it into a
spreadsheet application, and have him analyse the car while doing math. He 
would then also be able to write about real world data that interested him.

All cars produced after 1996 speak the ODB-II protocol. If you own a car, you
will find the physical interface located near the steering wheel or the
gear shift.

Scantool is licensed under the GNU GPL, programmed in C, and made available
mostly for Microsoft Windows users. There is a package for Gentoo
available, using some graphical toolkit. Would you be able to provide a
package for SuSE? Wouldn't it be cool if this was one of the standard KDE
or GNOME packages? If anyone on the list has time for this, it would be 
wonderful news.

Yours sincerely,
Haakon Meland Eriksen